The Problem with the Extreme Left (and a Contest Winner!)

The votes are in, the tallies have been counted, and the verdict is clear: Tom Tancredo is way more annoying than Glenn Greenwald.

So strong was public sentiment, in fact, that several voters chastised your blogger for even asking the question.

The most annoying guys are the ones who draw false equivalents between reason and logic on one side and batshit insane politicking on the other I hope you mention the tally against you in your follow up column.

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Another:

You're misleading your audience on Greenwald's positions to make him seem more loony than he is — ironically this is one of Glenn's favorite topics to write about; the fallacy of false equivalence, I think he once called it. Basically you needed someone you could make out as a leftist version of Tancredo, and he's way the fuck out there in his own whitey universe. Anyway, it's no real contest — bigoted idiot over media critic with angry rhetoric any day.

(For those who are coming in late, my first "Who is Most Annoying" contest asked you to choose between the right-wing ex-congressman who said Obama should be impeached for putting up "the weakest possible defense of the Defense of Marriage Act," and a left-wing blogger who thought The Washington Post's articles on the entirely predictable rise in intelligence spending since 9/11 was a sign of the coming bureaupocalypse. "This is the Real U.S. Government: functioning in total darkness, beyond elections and parties, so secret, vast and powerful that it evades the control or knowledge of any one person or even any organization.")

Of course, it was a trick contest. Tancredo is trying to stir up hatred, which has been his M.O. since he rode Mexican-bashing to a seat in Congress. He's either a shameless opportunistic demagogue or a fool or both — although this postfrom the FireDogLake blog asks a damn good question about how similar his crazy arguments are to mainstream Republican rhetoric, and why one causes shock when the other doesn't. In contrast, Greenwald is just a typical overheated leftist, the kind of guy who would have called his college administrators "fascists" back in 1968.

But I must confess, I actually do get more annoyed with the Greenwalds. Hating a guy like Tancredo is like hating a guy in a straightjacket for seeing bugs that aren't there. I expect more of liberals.

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1. I expect them to be liberal. That means looking carefully at both sides and studying the evidence before spouting off.

2. The independents who swing our elections will not abandon the paranoid rhetoric of the right for paranoid rhetoric from the left. Remember, the leftists who rose up in righteous fury during the 1960s freaked out the heartland and helped usher in the Age of Reagan.

3. Something in the far left seems naturally drawn to Ralph Nader's argument that both parties are equally corrupt, no different than Coke and Pepsi. But Al Gore would not have invaded Iraq.

4. Because of No. 3 and the ugly realities of governing, the left has an enthusiasm gap going into November. So there's an irony: enemies like Tom Tancredo are actually helping the Democrats and friends like Greenwald are hurting them.

5. The extreme left is often just wrong. Our Vietnam strategy may have been doomed on a tactical level and horrifying on a humanitarian level, but it wasn't wrong to want to fight communism. The same hunger for insurrectionary absolutes mars, for example, Grist magazine's recent take on the death of cap-and-trade, which was perfectly sensible and well-argued until the conclusion: It's a sad, corrupt state of affairs this country finds itself in. I wish I had some hopeful words to offer. But at this point, American government appears to be broken.

FYI to Grist: the American government has been broken since about 1776, and somehow Obama passed the health care bill and the financial regulation bill. Also, global warming is probably the most difficult problem humanity has ever faced. I love you guys, but calm down a little.

As I read the contest comments, though, I realized that my anti-Greenwald impulse is probably deeply psychological. Like the children of alcoholics, I'm trying to get Mom and Dad to quit slugging it out (it's so embarrassing, especially when my friends France and Sweden drop by). I am the ACA of bloggers, not the Adult Child of an Alcoholic but the Adult Child of America, and I resist taking sides even if it's pretty obvious that Dad is the one who's acting like a jerk — because the prospect of divorce is too horrifying.

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